Economy, Gym, Auctions and Tutorial Suggestions

My first suggestion concerns the economy, and takes ideas and viewpoints from this thread which was speaking about the way the Auction plays it's role and the way items have decreased the value of everything and so on. One thing I want to point out is that this is a PVE server. Normal servers like Vanilla, Factions and Survival all have a relatively similar economies just because of the way the "lifeline" of their wealth goes. It is based on crops, which you grow, then sell and then use your money. Through raiding and stealing by other groups and factions, the economy works itself out and whoever is on top ends up getting overthrown over time which is a good thing. This cannot happen on a PVE server due to the fact that we cannot steal from each other and is a good thing too, because people would just create massive untouchable farms hindering the economy useless. Where I'm going with this is that there are pretty much only 4 ways to make money on the server. Selling Items and setting up a shop, training for money, selling Pokemon and voting are the only real ways to get yourself a sort of income. The one bad thing about these 4 things is that besides shopping, the money flow is one sided. It's all pretty much going to one person, who doesn't have to give up anything in return as they're producing it for free. One way to fix this would be to add a loss of money from losing battles, like in the regular game. The way this would work would be that if you lost a match, 5-10% of your balance would be taken from you. There would also be a tax put on this, which would actually make the money worth something. For example, if I had 100 PD and lost a battle to Lemonita, I would lose 10 PD and Lemonita would receive 7 PD. The tax is important because it helps from creating what is currently happening in the economy, that nasty inflation since the money is never lost unless you buy things from the server store. More pros to this idea would be that it would reward Gym Leaders by winning battles, encouraging them to do their job more and sort of paying them for it as well. Another pro is that it would be easy for new players to understand since it happens in the original Pokemon games anyway The one problem with this is that people who have extremely high balances would not want to battle as it would cause them to lose a great deal of money. Two points to be made here are that there really is nothing that expensive to buy, and these people with the crazy amounts of money would be losing a lot, but it's not like they would be using it on anything anyway. The way to fix it however would be to do one of two things, put in a cap to how much people would lose (Which would have to be moved higher and higher depending on the fluctuations of the economy), or make it so that after losing X amount of battles, a cool down is applied and you won't lose money until that time has passed.

2. Gyms

One of the main selling points to the server are the gyms. Especially with the influx of new players, I feel that there should be some universality to the gym times. Don't get me wrong, I feel that the way the gyms are handled now are great, but there were things you had to fix in the past to get the system to the point it is at today and I feel like this is one of those things that will put the gym system on the next level. All it would require from gym staff would be to go through and ask every leader what time they are most active at, and how often a week they think they can do it. I know that Gym Leaders are volunteers, but like volunteers in the real-life workplace they can be trusted with some accountability. Of course there wouldn't be any real consequence besides maybe losing your job due to inactivity, but this would definitely make the whole system a lot smoother. If when asked "When will the Rock gym be open?" you could say at 12:00, people would be lining up ready to go. It would just be a lot more efficient as a whole rather than the current system, which is waiting until one gets online and hoping they open the gym. Pros to this would be you could put signs up outside of the gyms, telling the times in which they are projected to be on and people would also be able to schedule around the times, making the system a lot smoother all around. Again, I know that the leaders are just volunteers. I just think that this will make the whole system a lot better and there is no harm done if they are on at the time and are busy and just have to say can't open right now I'm busy.

I want to clarify this further, this would apply per each individual gym leader. So out of all the Rock leaders, each of them would have a sperate time that they can be expected to open the gym at, which would work best in their schedule.

3. Auctions

This point ties into the first one about the economy and this post I mentioned before. In the auction, Pokemon that had 5 ivs used to be worth a lot and were a scarcity, but due to people flooding the market with their massive breeding plants they become common and easy for people to get if they know how to access the auction. On Kanto, you could just auction any Pokemon you wanted and find one with 5 ivs and bred moves and it would only cost you 200-300 PC. While yes you should be able to do whatever you want and price them how you please, it was just one person with these low prices. Without getting further into detail on that note, I will lay out my suggestion. A cap on the amount of Pixelmon you can have at the auction at one time. If you could only place 10 Pokemon in the auction at one time, you wouldn't have such low prices for these sort of rare commodities. It would encourage people to put them up for higher prices, and while yes they could still put them up for lower prices and assume they would sell fast and put more up, you have to think that they won't sell that fast because you're only putting up 10 out of the whole Pokedex worth of Pokemon (Or the ones available in Pixelmon atleast.)

Alternatively (Or you possibly both of these ideas together), you could put a limit on the amount of Ranch blocks a player is allowed to place. This would limit the amount of massive breeding farms that flood the economy with these high iv pokemon, since they just continue to get them and throw them into the economy since they have no use for them. I understand it should be your right to make a giant farm if you want, but I don't see the real harm in putting a cap at 15 - 20 ranch blocks. Both of these ideas would allow more people than just the select few to take part in making money from the Auction.

4. Tutorial

My suggestion for a tutorial is one of two things. Either when you join, have a tutorial plugin similar to this that flies you around the map and shows you points of interest, mainly the gyms, plaza and the Pokecenter and FORCES the new players to acknowledge certain things. One thing in particular is the level cap. Something needs to be done to teach players about the level cap, and I think a tutorial would do this.

In place of a plugin to make a tutorial, you could also make it so when a new player spawns they have to walk through a hallway and they have to look at the signs which are displaying information to them, including how to make Pokeballs, level caps, etc. I have played on multiple servers that have utilized this to show new players about special features, and it was very informative and helped a lot.

- I know this is a lot to read, but try to have an open mind about every idea and put personal bias aside.

1. Terrible idea. /baltop shows that Anaar has over 250K PokeDollars. If he lost then he would lose 12.5K if the tax was 5%, 25K if it's 10%. That's ridiculous. No one would battle gym leaders anymore in fear of losing their money. No one would want to be gym leader because they will lose all their money when they get their asses kicked. Not to mention, there would be an incredible amount of money laundering too as people would give their balance to others to avoid losing it in battles. If this is in any way implemented, I will literally kill myself and never show my face on this server again. Luckily, it's such a dumb idea that it won't be

This would be fine if there weren't different time zones. We have leaders from all over the world, USA, Belgium, Lebanon, Australia so times that are easy for some people to get on may be late at night early morning for others. Sometimes things come up and having set times will leave people disappointed. Say I'm a gym leader and I say "Hey I'll be on at 3:00 to do gym battles" and then a friend calls me to hang out, I'm not going to say "No, I told the server I'll be online at 3 for gym battles." Having gym leaders actually declare what time they'll be on will lead to complaints when they don't actually come on.

3. What exactly is going to stop me from just selling my Pokemon on the server? Sure, the auction automates things but I can still sell Pokemon on the server. I've made probably upwards of 15k on this new server by selling Pokemon. As far as your limit on ranch blocks, I'm not sure if I agree. Then again I'm breeding several dozens of different Pokemon so I'm probably biased. But that won't solve any of these "problems" since a decent amount of people have alts. Say I have one alt and the limit is 20 per account. I can still produce 80 Pokemon every 2 hours (40 ranch blocks) if I'm constantly checking. Having this limit isn't going to stop anything. There's already tens thousands of Pokemon that have been made so implementing these changes would stop nothing. I know for more than half of the Pokemon I sell, I already have a full box full of them along with dozens in auction of each.

Zach, you clearly didn't read everything through, probably just read the first sentence and wanted to shoot it down immediately, and you have a personal bias which I said to try to leave out but you brought up anyways so your points while semi-valid are not only answered in the original post, but were there from the start so please read the post before beating it down.

1. Like I said, there is supposed to be a cap. 5% is a lot I know and it was just the first thing that popped to my head. Something like .1% or so would probably be more appropriate you're right, don't be so caught up with the exact numbers this is just a suggestion.

2. Gym leader availability is a joke, sometimes they're on, and that doesn't mean that they will open. This is a totally different idea, and like I said it's okay if they're busy with stuff they're just volunteers but the idea strives to keep everything uniform.

3. The auction is a lot different from selling on the server. Everything is done for you through auction, and it becomes 100x easier to flood the market. I know you breed a lot which is probably why you shot this down, and having an alt is just one way to get around the system you're right, but the fact you just said you can produce 80 pokemon every 2 hours and shoot out that number tells me that you'll be one of the people flooding the market if the Auction were to be reopened, which was the problem discussed in the thread I quoted.

tl;dr - You probably didn't read this either zach, so please just take a look at the ideas in their whole and how they would impact everyone on the server and not just yourself.

1. So you're not going to mention a specific cap but then give me BEEP when I don't acknowledge it. It's a dumb idea, the economy doesn't need to be regulated for 2 reasons, 1) they stopped selling PokeDollars on the server shop meaning that money is not being pumped into the server at nearly close to a rate as it was in the past. The staff have already made many modifications to limit the amount of money being pumped into the server through PokeTrainers. Not to mention 2) the PD sinks that will soon be implemented such as EV House which will definitely cause a dent in the amount of money on the server. Therefore, I believe the tax is totally unnecessary especially since it looks increasingly unlikely that money from Kanto will transfer which is probably the best idea. The items now are at a good

2. Gym leaders are here to volunteer, as you mentioned so they don't have any obligation to open the gym whenever someone tells them to. 9/10 gym leaders not named Quantum will open the gym upon request. Just like you and I have schedules, so do gym leaders. Keeping things uniform as you'd like would only lead to confusion. Take your own advice and leave your bias aside, most gym leaders are happy to accept challenges when asked, just because you might have gotten rejected doesn't mean they are all the same.

3. Breeders aren't the only ones who are effected by this. There are plenty of other Pokemon to be sold on the server aside from competitive Pokemon, shinies and legendaries being them. However since we're on the topic, your idea of only being able to place a certain amount of items on the auction leading to increasing prices is wrong. As anyone who's ever learned anything about economics would know, low quantity and high demand leads to higher prices. Here's a chart for those of you who are visual learners to follow along with:

However, I think you're both underestimating the market and overestimating the demand. If things were the way you described them to be, then yes, this would be the way things happen. The prices would soar as the demand would be so high and the quantity is too low to handle the demand. But that's simply not the case. Let's pick a Pokemon, Riolu for example since it's very popular (at least at my shop). Let's say there are 10 people selling their 10, 5IV Riolus on the auction, basic math, 10 x 10 = 100. There will never be enough demand to exhaust this supply until this server constantly has 100+ people on the server. But with say, 500 active people on the server, do you think that only 10 people would breed such a popular Pokemon? I don't think so. Even if there was only enough supply to meet the demand, let's say these 500 active players demand 100 Riolus, people will be constantly replacing their Riolus. You breed 1 Pokemon every 40 or so minutes. If you're on for 4 hours, that's 5 or so Riolus that you get. In one day you'll never sell that much unless something crazy happens. Even if the demand outweighs the supply, the Pokemon can constantly be resupplied not to mention new sellers entering the market constantly. Breeding isn't exactly a hard concept to pick up and when you do pick it up it's very easy especially through the IVs command which takes out the grinding that the traditional Pokemon games have. This is all figurative but I'm sure you get my point.

As far as prices go, people will always undercut. No matter what. I have sold my pokemon for 150 PD since the second this server started even though other guys have been selling theirs for so much more. I'm probably just ruining the economy with my low prices but that's what people like I do. I sell mine at a low cost even though I'm selling a similar or better product then my competitors I'm offering it at a much lower price. Regardless of how much others sell for. As far as I know, Deremei is the only one who rivals me in terms of price for 5IV Pokemon. And I like to have lots of Pokemon for sale which will maximize my possible sales. It's basic economics really.

The ability to breed high IV pokemon is available to everyone and therefore it's impossible for anyone to gain a true completive advantage in the breeding market. Some people are just more willing to put time, effort, and patience into it and those are the ones who deserve to be rewarded.

1. My biggest issue with the first point is that the people with the most money aren't really regular battlers. The people that tend to have more money on the server are people that know how to breed and likely have a better idea of how to battle. While they would be penalized more for losing a battle, they also likely wouldn't be battling much. The people that do battle often are people that already don't have a lot of PD - and those are also the same people that challenge the gyms over and over. Someone with bred pokemon and an ok strategy might take a couple of tries to beat the gyms, but the majority of people that challenge are people that aren't prepared (i.e. aren't breeding, aren't ev training, and don't have PD) While they might lose less for each loss, they will also be losing more times. I understand that you believe that the incentive of winning might encourage some people to become better battlers, but you also have to consider the target demographic of this server. This type of system also rewards people that already are good battlers and it would stand to reason that, rather than there being a balancing of money, there might just be a shift from one handful of people to another. I don't think it is a bad suggestion, I just see some downsides like it punishing younger/inexperienced players (most of the people on the server) as well as the fact that we would need to find and implement yet another plugin on the server for this to happen.

2. Regarding gymleaders - you are pretty much asking exactly what is already happening. I know, I know, you want them to state a specific time that they can open the gym - I did in fact read your entire post. But, you also say that it is ok for them to not open the gym at that time if they are busy. Well, right now they state times when they will be on, and if they are busy than they aren't on during those times. We already have an issue with attrition due to loss of interest in the server, and making it more of a job would only serve to further cause that. What we need is decent battlers applying to be gymleader so that when one person is burnt out or doesn't want to do gym battles they don't have to. I can only speak from my experience, but it is wonderful having two other active gymleaders in the same gym as me. It is not a matter of requiring people to open at a specific time but rather of having an adequate pool of people to hire from.

3. I agree that breeding had a huge impact on the economy - a much bigger impact than any other single factor. The people that breed on a mass scale are also the people that play on the server the most often and, just as importantly, consistently. This is just something to keep in mind as we want people to stay on the server and play consistently - I would hate to lose our most consistenet players because we limit them in some way in terms of gameplay (i.e. breeding). Many people do just sell in chat because you are more likely to get someone interested if you advertise in chat than if you just post in auction - many people on the server don't even know what the auction is. This is not coming from someone that breeds to sell either - on Kanto I bred pokemon for my personal use in battles. If I bred more than 1 5iv of a pokemon, often times I put it into wondertrade or just gave them away to newer players for free. I am currently planning on challenging all of the gyms with pokemon that are wild caught. But if I did enjoy breeding and that was the only thing that I did on the server (which is true for some, or at least was on kanto) I would hate to see that limited.

Zach I would like to hear other people's opinions besides yours and mine, so I'll make it short.

1. Good point, maybe don't implement the tax but losing money for losing a battle seems like an interesting idea to me, if it could even be implemented.

2. Theres no way it would be more confusing for people by putting times on which you can actually get a gym battle.

3. People like you were what ruined the Auction before hand, allowing only a few select people to profit from it when it came to IVs. Of course you don't want it changed, you've been doing it from the start so you have the advantage and want to keep it that way so like you said you and Deremei will be the two rivaling it out. It's an attempt to prevent what happened on Kanto before it happens again.

- Whoever read all this information, try to go off the main points and what actually makes sense rather than what was just thrown together in an attempt to shoot down the ideas like a Japanese bomber in WW2.

Jesus christ, what a daft man you are. I'll just address the third issue since you don't seem to get my point.

Just because me and Deremei sell for cheaper than others, doesn't mean that we dominate the market. I see guys like Cyan_Wings or Anaar sell a same Pokemon that I do for 400 PC, 250 more than I do. I've seen MaccaJr sell a Pokemon that I do for 500 PC. That's what so great about this server. Everyone has their loyal customers and just because I sell for cheaper doesn't mean that people are going to always buy for me. I am by no means the most popular breeder on the server and everyone has their little followings that will always be loyal to them. No one has an advantage over the auction or selling pokemon on the server.

I love how you say I ruined the old auction. Believe it or not but I joined the old server only about over a year ago ( a server that has been active for more than 3 years before I joined) and within a month or so I was breeding constantly 5IV Pokemon and selling them. It's not a hard thing to get started with but you have to know what you're doing. So don't act like breeding is like an exclusive group that no one can get into.

Nice to see that this has devolved into a flame war. Regardless, while I think you have many good ideas involving the economy and auction, the gym and staff teams had a meeting discussing these issues already and have sent our proposals to Lemon. We have been instructed not to discuss the matter any further, so that's all I'll say. As for your idea for the gym leaders giving stated times in which they will be online, we actually already have this: http://www.pixelmoncraft.com/forum/topic/3749. The issue being of course that it is rarely followed. Lastly, I agree that some sort of tutorial would be useful, but Lemon seems loath to add plugins and changing spawn seems rather impractical.

Going to have to request that the participants in this topic be respectful, watch the language, and not use inappropriate images in their comments. You guys should be capable of discussing this without resorting to those sort of things.

[EDITTED (first post was done on cell phone on my lunch break, so it came out auto-corrected in a lot of places that didnt need correcting, and the post was messy]

Tiggleybiggles, you think you could jump on TeamSpeak and have a chat with me sometime? I like your ideas, and would love to discuss a bit further.

I love your taxation idea for one. The rest of your economy ideas need a little bit of work however. It's definitely the big topic that I'd rather talk to you about in TeamSpeak.

With gymleaders, I absolutely agree. A handful of our gymleaders don't set very good expectations for players on when they will open gyms. There is definitely something to be done about that perhaps, and that would have to be something we would have to discuss with Smushi. A quality gym experience is what we want, and what we need. I'm certain he would be willing to address these issues in due time when he can find the time.

As for the auction, I have no strong opinion to comment but this. In order for changes to be made to the Web auction, we need WhiteSheep to develop for us on that. I do sort of like the idea of limiting how many slots you have to sell. Alas, zzachz may come off as a jerk, but he has a point, sellers can just flood the server chat with sales, and we want to deter that sort of chat traffic.

We do have plans for a tutorial, I would like to speak to you on TeamSpeak further so we can trade ideas a bit. That is all, hope to see you! I get on in the evenings -7 UTC us mountain time.

What a topic this has turned into, haha. I'm just gonna say this: I've been on this server for a little over 3 years, and I agree mostly with what Zach has to say. This is speaking not only from experience as a player, but experience as a gym leader on multiple occasions. Sorry if this is a bit long.

1. Economy and taxation: sorry to burst your bubble, but the taxation system you proposed simply will create even more economic problems. The server's economy has already gone down the toilet, as it always will, especially with the staff's constant intervention in the system, sometimes for the better sometimes for the worse. Taxation will, like Dontstopmenow said, hurt less experienced players while gym leaders rake in the cash from beating challengers, and gym leaders are nothing more than regular players who do gym battles, despite what some may say. I have been in this "position" on different occasions for a while, and most gym leaders just pound the snot out of new or inexperienced players, so if they made a profit off that, Jesus the mayhem that would ensue.

2. Gyms, ah gyms. Your idea isn't terrible, but rather impractical. One cannot expect a leader to get on every day at a certain time to do battles. Surprise surprise, some people have lives outside the server, lol. Although the current system in place right now isn't great, it's what we've had for quite a while and I do not see major changes to this coming anytime soon.

3. Auction: Respectfully disagree with your opinion. Limiting auctions will cause players to, for lack of a better word, become pissy. People will undercut each other breeding, and that's what will always happen, in any economy, with any product essentially. I sell every pokemon I breed for 200pc, and like what Zach said, although he charges less, I have certain loyal customers who buy from me consistently despite price. And about it helping the economy, yeah people will just sell on the server. The limit will be useless. Just another thing Lemon will have to pay Sheep for help with. Oh and limiting ranch blocks, yeah more pissy people who will just move to another server for full feature usage.

4. Tutorial: In theory, not a bad idea. But it requires more plugin work, which is a burden on Lemon right now. I can see something similar being implemented, but after the server gets all its bugs fixed and whatnot. Even though players will still ignore it and ask repetitive questions.

About the gym leader thing, sometimes peoples' schedules change, so that would not work at all. It would be very difficult for gym leaders to get on at the same time every day. If they play sports or something like that, there is no way that that would work at all. Also, most gym leaders are already pretty active most of the time. I see rock gym leaders on pretty often, there is usually an electric gym leader on most of the time, the grass gym is pretty active, there are 3 poison gym leaders that are very active, there are 3 psychic gym leaders that are very active. Erunnar is in the fire gym, and he is on very often. And finally, Slimey and xMewtwox are ground gym leaders, and they are online often. The only gym I don't see on as much as the others is the water gym, but even then they seem to be pretty active on weekends. Also, maybe I am just not seeing the water gym leaders as much because of my time zone.

I might put out arguments or opinions that have already been made, I simply can't be bothered filtering trough all of them. Just to clarify, I'm Charmander/Downyy, the guy that made the initial economy system and then neglected it into disarray. I don't own the Charmander account anymore, so I'm using my old/new? player account to make this post.

Point 1/3: The economy
History part, analyzing the flaws of the old system:
If we want to keep the new economy from falling in the same miserable state as the old one did we have to analyze what actually happened and see what went wrong.
Let us first look at what happened with the old kanto economy. The first mistake that I made was enabling /money top. This feature, that shows the top 5 richest players, caused an incentive to hoard money and compete for the #1 spot. I was also to blame for that behavior, since I participated in it myself. At first people with 15/20k were considered rich and got a spot in the top 5. This wasn't that bad. Prices were balanced. New people were able to afford some starter items and that's about it. They got $300 and valuable items like exp shares were maybe 150/200 or more. So new players had to work for new items, while more regular players were able to buy a few (so not stacks) of these useful items. At this point people mainly earned money by selling shinies and legendaries that they bought in the shop. It's important to note that there was no breading in pixelmon yet at this point.

Now we go a bit forward in time, still before breeding was a thing in pixelmon. People made bigger shops and casino's with a more regular audience. This is the first time that undercutting prices became a problem. The rich people now often had more then 100k at this point. Yet the prices for items kept going down. This caused the broken system that we've come to know on the old kanto server. Contrary to the ordinary economic graph where supply and demand are in balance with the prices, kanto got a very weird economic situation. The average wealth went up (even for new players), demand went up (or at the very least stayed the same at this point), supply went up because of the PvE system you pointed out in the OP, but prices kept going down! In a properly working economic system the prices of items and pokemon would have gone up to balance the decreasing value of money (inflation). This did not happen. I suspect the reason for this was the PvE system. The amount of items and pokemon in the economy went up, without it costing anything. People who only played for a few days and then left forever filled the economy with countless recourses to make new items. They gathered recourses, regular players bought up those recourses for cheap prices and the money that was earned by these new players was mostly poured back towards the regular/rich players in exchange for pokemon or items that were easy to get. To conclude this period: I (and maybe the rest of the staff) didn't account for the flaws in a PvE system where infinite recourses kept flowing in and the money from new players got left behind with the regular/rich players. We didn't make good money/item sinks and both money and recourses kept increasing without any resistance.

Now we get to second worst period for the economic system. Breeding was introduced in pixelmon. People in this topic have already pointed out most of the negative effects this had on the economy, so I won't go too much into it. At first high IV pokemon were valuable and cost around 3/4k each. These high prices didn't do that much to improve the economy since it had the same flaws of being an infinite recourse, even though it had a high pricetag at first. The prices of high IV pokemon quickly went down when more and more people discovered that you could earn good money with breeding.

The last part of the kanto economic history is the signshop. Once again, a big mistake on my part. I wanted players to have access to a fun feature that would make their lives easier. However, I didn't account for the negative impact this could have on an already broken economy. At this point people already had big shops that almost had a monopoly on the trade of items and/or pokemon. The only reason other shops were able to compete at this point is that the shop owners had to be online to make trades. Allowing them to make their own automated signshops removes this option and only a few big shops were able to trade their items in large quantities. Undercutting became an ever bigger problem. Prices went down more, supply kept going up like always and the demand went up. Shops were buying items from eachother in bulk just to eliminate the competition, thus faking the actual demand for items. Trade kept happening more then usual and shops only had more reason to keep lowering their prices. Owners of big shops didn't have much to lose. They were already rich enough and eventually they earned their money back by eliminating the competition.

So in the end we had a very broken situation that usually doesn't happen in normal economies. Everyone was rich and money was easy to get, even for new players. The supply of items and pokemon was trough the roof. The demand for those items/pokemon stayed the same and maybe even increased artificially because of the big shops buying eachother out. All of this without any good way of decreasing the amount of money, items or pokemon on the server.

Solving/preventing this economic disaster
First you might think; Why is there anything to solve? People had lots of money and resources. To put it simply: It's a game. It's supposed to offer a challenge. This includes a balanced economic system that challenges the player, like any other good game.

Here are two video's that illustrate the biggest issues that MMO economies have and some solutions to them. Now this might not provide a proper solution, since these solutions are for regular inflation. In the old kanto economy we had hyperinflation, but the prices remained very low. I don't claim to be an economic expert of any sort, so despite my attempt at reasoning why it might've happened in the text above, I can't be sure why we landed in such an unique situation.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W39TtF14i8Ihttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sumZLwFXJqE
​Money sinks
I think we can all agree that multiple money (and even item/pokemon) sinks are something every economy MUST have. In the current and old economic systems we barely had any. A few ways of creating money sinks would be:
- Taxes on trades
- Taxes on owning property
- The server selling unique items (consumable items are better in this case)
- Allowing people to buy features/functions with ingame money
- The server providing (EV) training services for money

There are many ways to implement taxes. The suggested method in the OP is only one of those. While it's not a terrible idea it does come in conflict with our servers main attraction, the gyms battles. Other ways some sort of tax could be done is by making an ingame item auction. This auction would allow players to put a LIMITED amount of items up for sale for a LIMITED amount of time. Other players could then open up this auction via an UI and buy the item. However, posting items on the auction would cost a certain amount of money. If your items doesn't sell you lose the tax money as well. This is just one of the many ways you can put "taxes" on things on the server.

The server should have a monopoly on selling specific usefull items. Normally you would have boss pokemon spawn in these items (good thing they are currently disabled). If you eliminate this infinite and free source of these items (let's take held items for example) and let the server sell these it would create an effective money sink. For this to work effectively you want to set a minimum cap on how low the price of these items would be able to get. You could do this by allowing players to sell these items back to the server shop for less money. So let's say you put up exp share for $500 and allow players to sell it back for $200. This way there is always an effective money sink of $300 whenever people sell back to the server. This would also put an end to the infinite undercutting of prices. It isn't a perfect solution since players would still be able to gather up these items in larger quantities, but it will slow down the problem. The price would always be between $200 and $500 this way. If inflation inevitably happens you can adjust by increasing the buy and sell price for this item.

If we want to create a stable economy on the server we have to make some sacrifices and get rid of some ideals that many of the players have.
- Not implementing everything that the player whishes for anymore. Don't be afraid to make them work quite hard to obtain certain items or other features.
- Allowing some form of trade between the currencies we currently have. This will help stabilize the main currency.
- Buying features that were previously only obtainable in the irl money shop.
- Making players possibly lose items on death. Right now nothing you do in the game has any risk to it. This can also be done in other ways, but making deaths more impactfull is a very effective tool.

That's it for now on the economy of the server for now. I have many more examples and ideas, but my mind is getting tired of typing all this text xD. I will add more on this topic when my head is a bit more clear again. Feel free to discuss and build on anything I said so far.

Point 2 gyms
I think enough has been said on this topic, so I'll keep it short. Gymleaders are humans and volunteers. There are already estimates of when each gymleader can be online. I think we've reached the limit of how effective the system can get considering it's on an online game with gymleaders doing this for the fun of it.

Point 4 Tutorials
A very difficult topic. Sadly it's in the nature of minecraft players to ignore any sign or hint of information that is given to them at the spawn. No matter how you give the information to them, they WILL ignore it. Putting up signs doesn't work, Hologram texts don't work, forcing them to do a quizz on the rules and basic system doesn't work. THe most effective system I've seen and we put in place for a while on the old kanto server was an interactive quest. If you make people go trough the basic principles in an interactive and fun way that they think is part of the gameplay of the server then they are more inclined to follow along.